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tv   Politics Public Policy Today  CSPAN  July 2, 2014 9:00am-11:01am EDT

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i don't know. this is the allegations. on the surface it doesn't seem plausible to me. certainly i think the steps that the military has taken are not warranted against rank and file of the muslim morsi was run in a very closed way and it did have secret policies and we'll just have to see if any proof comes out of these accusations. >> why do you think more radical schools of thought in islamic i guess jurisprudence of, you know, how -- why did that gain so much popularity as opposed to more liberal or less hard-line elements of islamic thought. >> so the question is why the more radical understanding of islam and ex-communication practices, vigilanteism and so
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forth had this popularity. the first thing is, i don't think it was that popular. these guys were always a small fringe. the mainstream of egyptian society was not like that. but it did have popularity in some quarters obviously. i think it was because of the structural contradictions of a post colonial society like egypt which, you know, from the '70s -- from the late '70s the egyptian government was seen by a lot of egyptians as more or less collaborating with israel in keeping the palestinians down and then the religious authorities, they didn't really do anything about that. of course, a lot of them were appointed by the government. they would have been fired if they had spoken out. it's kind of like in any society when something is going on that the young people feel is just wrong, then you get protests and sometimes even violence. you know, vietnam war period in
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the united states, a lot of young people decided that that war was wrong and then, you know, you got that and so forth. i think it was a contradiction between people's ideals and the hypocritical as they thought behavior of their institution. another question? yeah. >> throughout today's lecture the united states was rarely brought up and didn't seem as though they were too involved in any of these actions. at what point did disdain for the united states make its way into the muslim brotherhood or at least the more militant factions? >> well, the question of the united states and the muslim brotherhood is a little bit complex because of the u.s. support for israel against the palestinians, a lot of muslim brothers had a negative view of the united states and they were
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quite critical of it. on the other hand, as they, you know, ran for parliament, this is beyond our election, but in 2005 88 muslim brothers were elected to the parliament. there were muslim brotherhood visits. steny hoyer went there and visited with them. they became members of the establishment so they began to develop some american contacts and sometimes they were willing to cooperate with the united states so when mohammed morsi was the president of egypt, they had corrupt relations with the u.s. it wasn't a complete rupture. and so i think there's a certain amount of -- there was a certain amount of pragmatism in the group just despite its basic antipathy. the other thing was because they were excluded from the public sector, a lot of them were very pro free enterprise so they
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liked that part of america. morsi, you know, he has a degree from the university of southern california. he was an assistant professor at cal state northridge. he was involved in a nasa contract. one egyption before the elections told me, he said, why wouldn't egypt need dr. morsi? nasa needed dr. morsi. so there are these kind of contacts with the united states that are self-evident. i think we have to leave it there. thank you, everybody, and we'll see you next time. [ applause ] on wednesday, american history tv in primetime marks the 50th anniversary of the 1964 civil rights act. at 8:00 p.m. remarks by president lyndon johnson at the
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civil rights act signing ceremony. at 8:30 the congressional gold medal ceremony honoring martin luther king jr. and coretta scott king. donald ritchie on the congressional debate and passage of the bill with former cbs correspondent, roger mudd. and at 9:25 p.m. eastern a talk with todd kerdham, author of "two presidents, two parties and the battle of the civil rights act of 1964." now you can keep in touch with current events from the nation's capitol using any phone any time with cspan audio now. call 202-626-8888 to hear coop nal coverage, public affairs forums and today's "washington journal." and listen to a recap at 5:00 p.m. on "washington today." you can hear audio beginning
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sundays at noon eastern. call 202-626-8888. long distance or phone charges may apply. wednesday, two representatives of the kurdistan regional government speak. it's at 12:30 p.m. eastern on cspan. my first reaction was surprise because i had worked for mr. sterling. i coached the clippers in the year 2000. he invited me to his daughter's wedding. i had no idea exactly what was going on, but i also, because of my association, i know elgin baylor. i know what he was complaining about. i was confused not knowing which set of facts mr. sterling stood
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behind. and then when his words came out it was so obvious and shocking and just disgusting, all of those things wrapped in one. but the surprise of it, to find that type of sentiment in someone who relies on black americans for so much of his success and public profile was amazing. i just couldn't believe it that someone could have that much bigotry inside and think that it was okay. >> july 4th on cspan, a look at racism in sports just after 11:00 a.m. eastern. later, exploring the red planet with mars probe engineers and senior nasa officials beginning at 3:40 and later at 8:30 p.m. eastern, gun rights and the recovery of former arizona congresswoman gabby gifts. now on american history tv, a look at the rwandan genocide
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and spots from the u.s. and the united nations. this is part of a course called history of genocide taught by arthur vanden houten and john young at flagler college in florida. >> and so, i mean, as a kind of overview, just to refresh everyone's memory here, we started with an overview of the history of rwanda, talked about how the genocide really is an outgrowth of 19th and 20th century rwandan history. in the 19th century there were forces at work that were exacerbated that, you know, caused some tension between various ethnicities in rwanda or various groups i should say. these were exacerbated by colonialism in the 20th century. the germans and the belgians defining people by ethnicity and this tension was precipitated by the withdrawal of the colonial
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powers in the 1950s and '60s such that there was tension for the next 20, 30 years erupting at times into violence, becoming pretty severe in 1990 with the invasion of uganda of the rwandan patriotic front led by the president of rwanda. you know, this violence escalated through the early 1990s. there were reprisal killings and that brings us to our topic tonight which is the course of the genocide and especially a focus on the international and u.s. response to the genocide. so we're going to talk tonight about, you know, the kind of narrative of the genocide itself, what happened between late 1993 and the middle of 1994. of course, the genocide itself taking place over around 100
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days between april 6th, 1994, and mid july of 1994, early to mid july of 1994. and there are a number of books that our students have been exposed to. we can talk to them. we have samantha powers, "a problem from hell" which is a u.s. response to genocide, armenia, nazi genocide, chapters on cambodia, rwanda. and we've also read for tonight romeo delaris, accounts of the force commander of the u.n. peacekeeping force or the united nations mission for rwanda. he's a canadian general. never saw combat before this time. accepted this command in late 1993 and found himself in the
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middle of a mail storm in the middle of 1994 and is kind of a unique witness to this kind of thing. we've studied delaire, we've read power, we've also read a number of primary sources from the rwandans themselves, victims and perpetrators of the genocide so that's sort of where we're left tonight. we've also, you know, i mean, encountered this in an aesthetic level through film and other things. i think this leaves us very well prepared to talk about both from an intellectual and an emotional standpoint the international and u.s. response to this whole thing. >> i mean, one thing i would just add to that is that obviously during the course of the semester we've confronted you with quite a few different texts, ideas, themes, issues and challenges. obviously some of them have been quite difficult and quite wrenching, but really i think we've seen the course progressing to the time where we would spend, you know, two solid
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weeks on the rwandan genocide because of its implications for policy in the 21st century because so many of the issues we've confronted during the course of the semester crystallize here. there's no sense of weighing one genocide as more significant than another but just the course of events in the 20th century, the growing role of the united states as a world power and the way in which the genocide in rwanda unfolds i think have put us in a position where many of the different issues that we have grappled with during the course of the semester are really in front of us at this point. so it seemed appropriate to in a way try to synthesize some of these ideas and some of these themes. >> yeah, in ways rwandan genocide is the climax of this course. it's the most obvious case of genocide i think besides the nazi holocaust, the u.n. definition despite the quibbling of u.s. officials and other international figures in the midst of the genocide. it's an obvious case.
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it fits the description. people were singled out, targeted, there was an attempted distinction h. they not seized much of the rest of the country, been successful in their military endeavors to take the country in 1994, this might have led ultimately to full extermination and so in a way it's the most complete of all of the genocides. the pace of genocide is frightening, that in 100 days 800,000 is kind of the official toll, maybe not official, but the toll that is accepted, maybe more than a million. it's uncertain exactly how many people were killed, but a frightening number of people were killed. this is -- i mean, this genocide also produces some serious emotional resonances as we've seen in this course already. in confronting this we've all felt the emotions of this topic, and i think rwanda brings a lots of this to the fore,
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particularly the emotion of frustration as we encounter the international and u.s. response to this. we sort of stood helplessly by as it were and let this happen. maybe we could open it up. the first question here, as you read delaire, as you've read the sources, as you read power, how have you experienced that frustration? has that -- you know, what has been your experience as students with this? sydney? >> angered. >> okay. >> delaire, everything -- i marked it down every time delaire said we could have done this but we didn't do this. every time he mentioned i tried to get this through. i told them this was going to happen and nobody reacted or everybody's reaction was just oh, well we're not going to really worry about it. we don't have the resources for that or you can't do this. we won't let you do this. just like it's so frustrating and angering to read that, that they had so many opportunities. one opportunity after the next to intervene and they never did.
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>> okay. other responses? >> yeah, eddie? >> half measures. they didn't make true on their promises especially in the international community. i think it was in mid may when he called for reinforcements around 5500 men and the u.n. agreed on it but none of the countries sent men. they all argued who should send the men. so when it came down to just logistics, like that's what it came down to. it wasn't even about the lives, it was the logistics. like the money. what resources they could allocate to the problem and that eventually led to them not really responding at all. >> i think that's an excellent point. we're talking here about resources that -- i mean, given the collective resources that could be marshalled by the united states, by france, by really any european country that might have had a stake in this.
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of course, belgium sent some people but what was actually sent, what was actually provided was a pittance, and that's exaggerating it really. i mean, they sent damaged vehicles that showed up not in working order, with manuals in the wrong languages. without parts to repair the vehicles that needed to be repaired. of course the number of people sent was paultry compared to what could have been sent or needed to be sent. david? >> for me the most difficult kind of aspect of everything, because as you mentioned there were so many logistical and technical problems that weren't addressed until they realized they were a problem, the most difficult thing for me was just the empty leadership that came from the supposed leaders. >> right. >> they seemed to be only basing their mission on the symbol of
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international intervention and the principle that we're going to be monitoring and see what we can do but there was no weight. there was no practically applied leadership to those promises and ultimately when you have that, i mean, what it proves to us, to do something about this, that it can't be just words. you can't base anything in symbolism because those symbols mean nothing when it comes to the actual ground effect. >> what in particular would you call out about this, david, the weight, heft, force behind the rhetoric? >> it was the -- john -- not john but bobo or bubu. >> right, the camerunian. >> the attache who was in charge of the mission. >> yeah. and delaire's contact in new york. his response was whenever he would give them a report from the field, typically with
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political leadership, if you want to trust the people in the field giving feedback because they're the ones that are actually in the physical situation, but they didn't seem to regard anything that delaire had to say. their response was always, no, you're straying from the bounds of your mission. >> right. >> and i think ultimately that -- i mean, that was to me the most concerning. >> i mean, it's so striking in delaire how frequently people he's appealing to seem to be playing defense. they seem to be looking for ways to effectively avoid executing acting on what it's calling for or what, you know, just seems compelling based on the circumstances. >> often this is out of self-interest. you know, one has to of course analyze motives and take a lot of things into account here but it seems that they're -- at times people who should be perhaps -- i mean, hindsight of course is 20-20. we can look back on this and say people should have acted
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differently, but the kind of plate tent self-interest that comes across so many times. the careerism that seems ton happening so often is particularly frustrating. >> how out of touch everybody seemed to be. de e e delaire talks about that. the manual is written for post world war ii not post cold war. i think it reinforced when you see the inaction that the government appeals to. in power, too. just the complete out of touch with what is going on on the ground and we saw it in bosnia, we see it here. even in cambodia there was the disbelief because that was not what the modern world was supposed to be.
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>> so what they do, you raised it and david raised it, they do a symbolic raise of aid. madeleine albright after the pullout, they reduced the size of the u.n. troops on the ground from somewhere around 3,000 or something like that, 3,000, 4,000 down to -- the official size it was supposed to be reduced to was 270 people in the country of rwanda which is the size of maryland and with a population of 10 million people or something like that. 270 peace keepers. and she says, and this is a quote, that they are to have a, quote, small skeletal operation to, quote, show the will of the international community. we're not going to tolerate this. we're not going to tolerate the killing of innocent civilians so we're going to leave people in the country to show that we have
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a will, right? but it's just, of course, coming across as completely empty rhetoric. >> speaking on leadership and inaction, what really bugged me was the fact that they always said that even any real force would take like time, like with the bombing, we had to find the plane, then we had to find the clearance, but when france decided to send in operation turquoise they were there like that, you know? that was very frustrating to show you had the capability, there wasn't the bureaucratic paperwork you had to go through. >> or even more frustrating perhaps at least from our perspective, once the united states decided to get involved, which was to aid the refugee crisis mostly of the genocide heirs leaving rwanda, 1.7 million hutus fleeing into neighboring zaire, that at that point, you know, all sorts of
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aid was marshalled. and i guess this is a kind of, you know, band aid on an open wound of the aorta or something like that, right? we are going to do something at this point but in delaire's words, the chapter before the cop clugs. >> too much too late. >> too much and far too late and it really, again, rings very hollow. david? >> yeah. one of the things that's indicated that i pulled out of delaire's book, the hindering thing was you only had a small number of leaders. delaire, he had no help. before that his political advisor or commander got sick. he couldn't come in. there was no replacement. so you had a very inexperienced general. you deal with not only the political aspect but the
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military, preparedness, security groundwork but at the same time he had to deal with things like one of six. >> power? >> of delaire. this kind of -- this writing i think goes with the conversation we're having where i also thought that planting -- this is the second paragraph. i also thought planting the u.s. flag was the same purpose of my flag raising. demonstrating helping my country move to lasting peace. we were still having endless administrative and resource problems. later in the paragraph he says the colonel radioed back saying they didn't have paper and pencils to write with. it was denied for budgetary reasons. later on, it's maddening that i was forced to fight an internal and petty war. he talks about they don't have kitchens, no food. they had to struggle with lodging for the soldiers.
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i mean, it was a struggle to get soldiers in the first place. the fact that they get there and they don't have the soldiers to maintain a desend living style. these are the most basic failures. >> except for the belgians, of course. >> right. right. >> why were the belgians given nice quarters? how did they end up in the position that they were in? >> it was written in their contract, wasn't it? >> yes. their contract to the united nations was that they had to be housed in brick and mortar buildings. they were not to be in tents. and this wasn't, you know, sort of for the comfort or anything like that of the soldiers, it was to put on a good show in front of africans who were inferior peoples in their eyes. it was kind of a plate tent relic of colonialism and the belgians were the colonial power in rwanda for a long time. that hadn't disappeared in the 1990s even though they had been gone for 35 years. >> tiffany.
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>> i think what's really frustrating about this is how can they deny the pace sick access to resources. all you have to do is sign off and they have them. but then when it comes down to where delaire is going to be housed, he wants him to be in a nice mansion. he has to keep up appearances. it's ridiculous. it's ridiculous he's willing to expend those resources to keep up appearances but not the resources to be effective in rwanda. >> yeah. matt? >> you were talking about belgium and i just struggled with how they decided that they wanted to partake in the u.n. just to help out the rwanda case because essentially they kind of set up the political landscape that allowed this genocide to occur. they're doing the -- they had
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their identification guards and they left and said, hey, fend for yourselves. they decided they wanted to come back. they wanted their own houses and spread out through the whole town which is a logistical nightmare. you'd rather have all of your soldiers in the same area defending one another. i don't understand what they were doing in rwanda. they didn't even seem morally -- they had a moral reason to be there. hey, we're going to come and cause a ruckus. they didn't help really. >> this legacy of effectively their occupation and establishment of the political institutions and the political practices. it's also striking, too, as delaire says and powers gestures towards this. it's coordinating the different national groups within the force and the belg gaianbelgians, the superiority, if not a blank check, at least a fairly broad rift to resort to force, to
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violence, effectively complicating beyond measure his ability to sort of negotiate in this most delicate moment and, again, right, the legacy of all of this just weighs so heavily on the circumstances. >> matt raises a very important point here, and that is this legacy that the belgians have makes it puzzling. just to refresh our memory, the belgians are the ones who instituted the system of identity cards which shockingly once the belgians left and rwanda became independent, they kept in place. so people in rwanda had to register either as hutu or tootsie or twa although that's a small segment of the population. this identification card that people had to carry was really a signal for persecution. the hutu government placed quotas on certain professions, teachers, government ministers, physicians and people in other
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professions could not be -- only a certain percentage of them could be tutsi. they kept in place this relic. at the same time when people find out that the belgians are coming in, particularly the hutus, they're concerned because this is, you know, kind of the entrance of their old oppressor. there are strange motivations going on all over the place. >> delaire talks about that, too, how they would react inside the country which adds more constraint to his already kind of difficult position. but what i was going to say was i think it's important to note that the u.n., i mean, when we say this was a u.n. kind of mission, that almost sounds like the whole weight of the u.n. member states was behind it, but that's obviously not the case. i mean, he writes here that when he september his -- >> for more obstructionists than that data base.
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>> yeah. yeah. when he sends in the recap of his reconnaissance and what he thinks is going to be necessary, he says most countries didn't comment, didn't have positives, negatives, or any kind of comment to review. they probably didn't even read it except for i think the countries that he points out is belgium, canada had concerns about using their own troops. so the only -- so there was almost -- it was almost as if the u.n. were seeing an agenda saying we're going to go to rwanda, that's going to happen. whoever is in charge of that, they can handle it. that's not my duty. it has the u.n. name on it. when it ultimately fails, being part of that organization, i mean, total failure. void of leadership is the only phrase i can think of. >> sorry we passed you over. >> that's okay. that actually brought me to another question that i had, like how convinced are delaire and powers in the effect of the global complacency on the interventions of the french to remove the upper echelon of the
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rwandan government? i thought that was really interesting. the french come in in operation turquoise and the global community has been so complacent up to this point. the french see this as a green flag the same way that the belgians thought, well, look. we can go in. we have this contract. we need to appear superior. i thought it was really disturbing how the colonial legacy has maintained in africa through global complacency that has been there for generations, years, hundreds of years and how it's not looked at as such in a modern era because, again, we see ourselves as a modern people. and so the legacies of colonialism and slavery and all of that are persisting in a modern time and how reluctant we are to face that. >> in essence there's a default to the old politics, to the colonial era to even the
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earliest stages. >> the french are getting their own out. >> yeah. they're constantly supplying the rgs, the hutu government in the first place. all through the leadup to genocide and throughout genocide, they're getting supplies in, they're getting weapons in. this is part of the story that is not well known and not often told about the rwandan genocide. the french it seems are quite come police cisicitsit -- compl >> the french are in it. >> it's interesting in the context of french politics at the time that the decision to intervene takes off. there's a couple sort of key events. one is when nelson mandela, shortly after being elected, right, as president of south africa, begins to urge that there needs to be action, there needs to be intervention. we know that internal french government sources are anxious at that point that the kind of
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anglophone part of the english speaking government will see this as they need to now step in and intervene, but also domestic french politics, right, play this role. in the french system you have the president and prime minister. you can have situations with divided government. at this moment you have a divided government. you have the socialist president and the neo galast parties have gotten to be the prime minister. hey, look, we're the party with a heart and this is an opportunity for us to demonstrate that they are, again, cost cutting -- that they are sort of cost calculating technocrats and aggressive action at this moment, you know, can demonstrate the fact that we have, again, these moral commitments. it's interesting, too, some of this and the comments that professor young made and the comments that david and andrew
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referred to is that when the scope of the genocide becomes increasingly clear by early june, that's when you start to get a constituency in the developed world for intervention and one of the real tragic dimensions of this ends up being that significant beneficiaries of that constituency end up being to them themselves. consequences in part lead to circumstances of the displaced persons camps in zaire at the time. the legacy of that can continue to destabilize the entire region. >> as delaire says about this, this is in the power book where he's quoted, my mission was to save rwandans. their mission, these international missions that come in in june that's organized in june, their mission was to put on a show at no risk, right? unfortunately i fear this is all too often the case with
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international aid in general but particularly in this case, right? these are photo opportunities for so many people in the international community that we're doing something about the tragedies that are occurring in africa, right? let's send diplomats. let's send political figures. president clinton makes it there a few weeks after the genocide is stopped. these are photo ops. but there's no risk involved in any of these things, right? and delaire and very few others are left with the entire burden of risk through this whole story. shannon, you've had your hand up for a while. >> drawing from this idea sort of in terms of the intervention, i found myself particularly disgruntled by the fact that delaire's u.n. colleagues bring up the fact that there are so many other issues going on in terms of the global community trying to face former yugoslavia's conflict in particular. i guess it's easy to speak in a
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retrospective sense, but it was just so hard to read that and think, well what they were doing in the former yugoslavia and bosnia amounted to nothing. it was virtually nothing at all. you read on page 349 delaire says, i couldn't help thinking too bad this slaughter was not in a market in yugoslavia. maybe somebody outside of rwanda would have cared. and it's almost the sense like that came to nothing. we or rwanda at least got so little attention from the global community and meanwhile the global community and people from the u.n. are saying, yeah, but we're doing all of this great stuff in the former yugoslavia, and we know of course that wasn't the case. >> if you go on in that passage, i mean, this comes directly to the united states. i certainly remember in 1994 exactly what i was doing at this time. it was a pivotal moment in my life. i personally was preparing to go to africa at that point.
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i was a freshman in college. i was exactly where some of you are, you know. delaire says, as it happens, the rwandan genocide was having a hard time knocking the south african elections, which of course were monumental, all right? and it's understandable why that was such a big news story, but then south african elections and american figure skater t er ton harding's troubles off the front page. this is a monumental year. there have been specials on tonya harding and nancy kerrigan this year, too. i don't watch a whole lot of television but, you know, when i turn on the bbc i see stuff about rwanda. when i turn on american television i don't see anything. i mean, this is -- this is
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terribly concerning, i think, that 20 years on even something big and fundamental to international identity as this still takes a back seat to the whole tonya harding/nancy kerrigan soap opera that happened 20 years ago. >> and, you know, another story that's also received attention on its 20th anniversary, right, was curt cobain's death, too, right? that also was on -- >> and the film you may have caught that reference. >> yeah. then it's in june, i think it's june 12th, right, is the murder of nicole brown simpson so the o.j. simpson saga. >> nothing's going to displace that. what dominates. >> internationally, too, i was in africa during the trial of o.j. simpson -- >> right. >> -- it was all over the news in south africa, the entire time it was going on. >> wow. >> even there few people talked about rwanda. probably more than in the u.s.
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but anyway -- what's that? >> it was our oscar pistorius. >> i guess so. >> sarah? >> i think powers encapsulates that very well because delaire mentions that one of his main missions was to try to get media feedback on the whole rwandan crisis but the american people specifically -- >> he had mark doyle of the bbc sending out stories on a satellite phone. that's pretty much it. >> right. i think that just the gross abandonment of the masses, not even just the government or political entities on this issue is probably the most frightening because we really gave no attention to it whatsoever. and it's also interesting, too, because our disinterest was reflected in our government and so powers mentions, well, if we had maybe put up more of a fight about going over to rwanda to give aide, our government would have followed what we wanted, which is -- >> this point, i mean, i was
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really struck in the power in her analysis of this. it ties into something that david said before, right? powers said there's a recognition on the part of the very top members of the american government in terms of policy making that there will be no cost paid politically for failure to take action, right? and that one of the things that becomes so central to the way american policy develops and unfolds and fails to intervene in any meaningful way at all, right, is the calculations that are ultimately made and the way the policy process unfolds. the policy process gets dominated primarily in the white house. it gets not -- they don't defer to the pentagon but they give the pentagon's voice on the dangers of any sort of intervention. a great deal of weight. that's a legacy of somalia. some of that is a legacy of president clinton's peculiar
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relationship. >> and vietnam. >> that's right. and the way that process unfolds, you know, in essence the sort of silence of the american people and american interest groups loom so large. it's interesting, if you compare this to the darfur example, even though darfur is not getting massive amounts of attention, right, across the news, where it is getting attention is amongst certain key political constituencies in congress, the african-american community, ee ven gall call cumulatikmucumulc evangelical community and the defense department and state department and just as critically in congress. so there you end up with pressure effectively on the government to take a more forthright posture. i don't know if aggressive is the right word. there we get the u.s. government in september of 2004 identifying
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the events in darfur genocide. as sarah said, this goes to explain in part reaching david's point the lack of political will. there is no -- there is no political pressure mobilized really in any way. now i think one of powers -- one of her main points always is that leadership could have mobilized, that pressure. that presidents don't have responsibility to be buffeted in the wind by, you know, sentiment on the ground. >> i think it was delaire was mentioning or power, only rwandan historian is adequate to actually know what was going on at that point with the private party, a woman, i forget her name. >> yeah. >> that was the only reference, the only real like major price we had on rwanda at that point. >> a quote from power on this, you know, just to show that there was no will on the part
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of -- and of course congress is going to respond to constituents. on page 375 of power we have trisha schrader of colorado, democrat of colorado saying, there are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas, and this of course is a reference to, you know, the "gorillas in the mist" movie that came out in the '80s filmed in rwanda. this is the hartland of the great gorillas of africa. there are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas, worried they'll be damaged, hurt, something is going to happen to them. but, it sounds terrible, she says, people just don't know what can be done about the people. right? and so, i mean, it's just horribly brutally tragically ironic that we have these
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interest groups in the united states in 1994 who were calling their congressmen and saying, please protect the silver backed gorillas but, you know, 800,000 people are killed by machete at the same time. danny? >> one thing that stood out to me was that pre1994, 1993 when they first got reports of the -- like cia intelligence had the predictability. they drew up the concept of sending in delaire, it talks about how they didn't encourage him to study rwanda. it mentions -- >> he couldn't find information. >> exactly. how his knowledge of rwanda was merely his assistant finding a small book that she picked up and gave it to him the night before he flew out to rwanda, and how that whole concept of colonialism rearing its ugly head where they didn't take the time to understand what they were going into. by the time delaire got there it
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was like, oh, crap, this is a lot more serious than everyone else -- and how even after the fact he came back and tried -- i guess my feeling is it was a disbelief at how it just keeps -- the circulation of no desire and no interest because of proximity. >> yeah. it builds upon itself. it's a vicious circle for sure. andrew. >> i was going to talk about constituency groups again. what i got from powers was that the like u.s. leaders used these micro victories by focusing on the rwandan academic who is over there. >> human rights watch representative in the country. >> right. there was the quote we spent more time trying to find her than, you know, anyone else. >> right. >> and it was just kind of weird to see how -- >> the metaphor of the doll, you know, a child protects its doll
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and they don't have this global vision of everything that's going on around. >> right. it was just frustrating to see them use these micro victories to validate their inactions or their semi-actions in rwanda. >> yeah. alex? >> i thought when i read delaire what struck me over and over again was isolation. the physical isolation of the country, isolation from the u.n. and isolation from his own troops out in the field and from the other groups within rwanda. the ngos. i thought that might have contributed to the political lack of will really. no one wanted to listen to him and no one like -- he couldn't really communicate. one satellite phone or something? >> yeah. at one point he's cut off. he can't get to the airport or he can't get through the airports. i mean, logistics in rwanda do not allow him to travel around without serious danger and he can't really communicate with anyone outside of the country except for the access through the satellite phone.
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>> right. >> isolation very, very important theme here. shelby. >> i think that was very ironic how you have this case where he's sitting there with one satellite phone. he kind of gives it to the bbc guy, get the story out. but you would think with all of the foreign countries countries not wanting to accepted troops in there in fear that something happens to him, he lose all contact, you would think the outside countries are trying to get to him or trying to make contact in some way. it's like everyone is like, yeah, he's over there and they don't really seem too worried about him. >> yeah. i mean, here's his wife and children, you know, stuck in canada in quebec city and desperate to find out and at times -- i mean, this is one of the haunting things i think about the delaire book is this -- this -- it's not frequent but sporadic kind of attention to his situation at home. it's never fully resolved, i don't think. i mean, psychologically this destroyed romeo delaire, you
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know? these regrets about his family and about the hell he put them through, right, over and over again here just bleeds through at times into the narrative. in a way it's some of the most heartbreaking stuff because it's so readily identifiable, i think. >> that one government figure that went to delaire's wife. just the way he started the sentence, we're here to tell you your husband's dead when in reality he wasn't. it's almost like if delaire died, nobody would have really noticed. well, that problem's done. >> i fear that's all too accurate, at least the perspective that he gives. and power backs him up on that, i think. i think that's probably true. tiffany? >> another frustration with this is that one the excuse is that the american government and the u.n. give for not being more involved is we don't want
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another mogadishu. that lends itself to it's inevitable that they have another mogadishu. they loss -- >> 18 marines. >> 18 marines in mowigadishu. >> are these cognates? are they similar? is this the same phenomenon repeated in rwanda really? just for background so we're all on the same page here, of course, there's the intervention. this is a chapter 7 intervention in mowing ga did i shu or somalia. it breaks out into anarchy, fighting between warlords in the early 1990s and international aid marshals itself to try to, you know, diffuse the crisis to get aid to the people who need it. and, you know, we almost have street to street or neighborhood
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fighting and so the international community rallies and sends in troops. the united states gets involved. i think i was a senior in high school or something like that at the time when this was happening and i remember there was a -- >> december of '92. >> yeah. that's exactly what i would have been. boy, that dates me. >> dates me. >> you remember better than i do but -- i remember my u.s. history teacher in high school had this political cartoon which showed santa claus on a sled. did i talk about this already? >> no. >> with the class? i don't remember. santa on a sled with his elves that have machine guns out the side. and santa says, to somalia, right? somalia is a muslim country. they wouldn't have been celebrating christmas. that's besides the point.
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that's the international perspective on somalia, that this is -- this place is worth -- if santa claus is going to pay attention to this, right, then we should, too. there was until the tragic events of which month in 1993? >> october. 1993. >> october of 1993 in an effort to relieve another part of the intervention force, the pakistanis who were there, the u.s. marines get into a fight with war lords in mogadishu. they get ambushed. some of them get killed. 18 of them ultimately. the worst thing -- this has repercussions not just for rwanda but for a long time after and is related to things like 9/11, that they stripped these bodies and desecrated them. mutilated them. dragged them behind vehicles through the streets of modadishu with the cameras of the
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international media rolling. okay? everyone back home, everyone in the united states -- you know, in much of at least the western world said, this can't happen. right? this became a paradigm, of course, for what happens -- or a lesson, i guess we should say, for what happens when the international community tries to intervene in the developing world or, more specifically, in africa. right? this becomes a caricature of africa. okay? of course, there are interventions. chapter seven interventions going on in the former yugoslavia as well. that's -- as we've talked about in this class , it's a differen situation. just to finish the point about how it's related to 9/11, people like osama bin laden were watching the events unfold in mogadishu. the perspective was the western world does not have the will to
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fight. that when they are punched in the mouth, they will turn around and walk away. okay? so the idea was if we punch them in the mouth, they're not going to retaliate. the punch in the mouth, of course, ultimately was 9/11. >> that message was perceived. >> that was part of the plan. >> to effectively call their bluff to see whether they had the stomach to effectively continue with the mission. the political context about somalia is also very important. november 1992, president bush loses the election to president clinton, right? we're in that awkward period in the american political landscape where inauguration is january 20th. but it's late november. in some ways it's around thanksgiving, and there are images, right, and the story is coming back that the food aid is simply sitting on the dock in
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mogadishu or it's being exploited by criminal gangs who are blackmailing different parties and using it for political purposes. what i also vividly remember about the mogadishu and the somalia intervention is when u.s. troops came ashore, they came ashore prepared for combat. they landed and they crawled along the beach. but at that point there was no combat, but they were actually filmed up close and personal by cnn cameras. so what i remember is this odd moment of cnn showing footage. and there are people with cameras right in the faces of u.s. soldiers coming ashore. right? as though they were almost under fire. they're, of course, doing what they need to do and what they're ordered to do in these circumstances. it gives it this very strange feeling. i think it becomes -- the perception of the american people is we will be there. we will sort this out. the good guys from the bad guys, deliver the food and this will be easy. of course during the summer of '39 -- '93 it gets increasingly
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complicated. from a policy making perspective, i think we do ourselves a disservice if we in any way underestimate how much somalia looms in people's minds. because what starts to develop within the white house and the policymaking process in '93 and '94 is this notion that if there is an insufficiently supported u.n. effort, we will be called to pick up the tab. so that's why you get things like, you know, presidential decision directive 25. authored largely by richard clarke. which outlines very strict, very strenuous, very demanding kinds of minimum criteria before the united states will even agree to participate in any mission whatsoever. clarke pushes it so far that he says, these are the strict guidelines for u.s. participation, but, in fact, before we approve a mission led by others, funded by others, to which the united states plays a peripheral role, we won't sign
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it unless they meet our criteria. the hurdle to get over becomes extraordinarily high, right, as we sort of move through these events in the fall and then the spring of 1994. yeah, elizabeth. >> a couple points. i think the underfunding of the u.n.'s relief to rwanda is outlined in the beginning of delair when he talks about going to the offices in new york and how unicef and the u.n. hcr -- sorry. yeah. they're, like, sexier than this peace keeping effort. the dpko. it's -- i think -- this is my interpretation. but, like, the unicef reaches out to children. and that's something that people are familiar with. and children are seen as less threatening. so when you have these peace keeping efforts that go into rwanda and yet to save these people, that we don't know what to do with the people. but yet the children, the unicef
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that comes in later we know what to do with them. we know the children can be taken, we know the children can be educated the way we want them to be educated. the second point was we were very much in somalia and mogadishu, the aid i think there was reflecting again a cold war aid mentality where we did the berlin air lift and we went in and we dropped this food and it was fine. but we're doing this in somalia and we're not anticipating the motivations that these people have. for hijacking the food and selling it on the black market rather than dispersing it to the people that need it. i think that referring back to my point about them being out of touch. and just completely unaware of what is actually happening in developing nations because they've only dealt so much with the developed world or post-war worlds. >> yeah. >> to go even further, for delair, they don't know what's happening for him. he was down to just having a glass of water each day to wash himself. he didn't have soap. he's like, there's an odor our
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men picked up that was very distinct. they remember it forever, basically. they had to ration their water. their food, most of those rations went back. they didn't have food. they would try to, like, get more resources and they'd be denied or they'd have to go get it. they don't have the resources to go get it in general. so this is -- then he's expected to, like, when they come in to be, like, all proper and stuff. and, like, have this front for it. i mean, it's just -- i don't know. them not allocating enough resources in general to him. to actually survive. not even to, like, help out but for them to actually survive in there. >> and the madness right when we says we're at the end of our water supply. they said, you need to get three competitive bids. >> in this situation. >> i just need 20,000 liters of water that can be brought in easily. >> i'm not a huge proponent of the u.n. in general. i don't think they are an
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extremely effective body. but i think that is seen in the inability to, yeah, fund and give them resources. because you need competitive bids. are you kidding me? these people don't have clean drinking water and you're telling them they have to go through this bureaucratic red tape just to be able to survive. >> there are no firms on the ground anymore. >> it's bizarre. >> this is just the disconnect that occurs over and over again throughout the delair narrative where the people in new york absolutely do not understand or make any effort to really understand what is going on, on the ground in rwanda. there's complete ignorance here. which is perhaps the most -- one of the most shocking elements of the whole story. >> jason? >> i was just going to say, i understand this is a complete failure of multilateral action of the international community. but i think we have this idea that we can just blame the u.n.
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blame the u.n. delair says this is more a failure of the member states. not the u.n. itself. >> right. >> this is just, like, uncommitted, as dave was saying earlier, to an ideal but only going halfway. >> well, and it gets in the way -- as a result of that, it gets in the way of things that might have been done without -- i mean, it's always going to be trouble given the circumstances on the ground. but, you know, the u.n. backs -- or becomes an enabler for the pullout given that the belgians after they lose their soldiers decide to pull out. this was the calculation, of course, of the rgf or the genoci genociders the whole time. if they killed a few belgians the belgian government would immediately withdraw the troops. the whole mission would collapse. but as power points out, this is one of the most damning pieces, you know, for the entire international community here,
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she points out the belgians didn't want to leave and be the sole bad guys here. right? so what did they do? eddie? >> they asked everybody else to leave with them. >> yeah. >> they wanted it to be a group effort. >> let's call up the united states and tell them, look, we don't want to be the only ones pulling out of here and turning chicken, so to speak, right? and so let's put pressure on the entire u.n. this whole operation is botched and going nowhere and dangerous. and so, you know, let's pull out of -- let's pull everybody out. and the u.s. buys this. this is their ally. they don't have a vested interest in rwanda. so they get onboard and begin to put pressure on the u.n. to pull everybody out. and they are instrumental in making the decision to leave. it's really u.s. pressure that causes that. so jason's point is extremely well taken. this is just one example of how
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it's the constituent members of the u.n. rather than, perhaps -- i mean, the organization itself, as elizabeth i think correctly points out, is full of bureaucratic red tape. there's this businessen teen structure you have to go through. rules, bylaws, so forth and so on tha( just get in the way. right? bureaucracy is the enemy of all progress. leon trotsky. think he's light in this situation. even more, i think, jason's point is valid it's the individual member states. perhaps we need to point the finger most strongly at the united states here and say they're the ones who precipitated the shameful acts that the international community perpetrated vis-a-vis rwanda. >> it's so striking because what we know is the belgian foreign minister early, early on, i think it's april 11th, 12th, spg like that appeals to secretary of state christopher and says exactly as you were just saying and a couple other people noted,
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we can't be the ones that just are seen as leaving the rwandans to some miserable fate. the united states, secretary of state christopher, jumps right on board. says, we will, in fact, support that. to pare down the force. to veto any effort to expand it. to have any more prominent, you know, role for the international community. the united states. or certainly any pressure for a broader intervention by the first world powers. and it's interesting because delair, there's still a period of a couple of weeks where delair still is getting signals that the belgians are still thinking about perhaps taking a more aggressive role. right? nothing obviously ever comes of it. so he himself, going back to alex's point about the isolation, is completely unaware of in a series of private conversations and then of kind of closed door april 15th meeting, the united states is making it clear there will be no expansion of the international role. again, it seems in part to reflect the experience of
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somalia, but i think it's got more issues than that, too. >> i think that's probably the most troubling thing with it. the international community in their response to anything, they can't agree on aid. they can't agree on supporting it. the only thing they can agree is abandoning the country. that's the only thing that gets their full commitment. >> which is the easiest and most problematic thing to do in the first place. >> tiffany? >> i did want to talk about what surprised me and stood out to me, too, was complacency of canada and its inaction. because it volunteered delair to be part of this mission. >> doesn't send any of his own troops. >> yeah. wouldn't provide a single other troop. besides trent. and they didn't even let him pick from his own troops. they forced him to pick from a list of people who had no experience with french. and no experience with rwanda. >> what does that say? this always struck me. i'm not a military person.
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i don't perhaps understand the mentality. but what does that say about delair either commendable or, perhaps, you know, critical? what can we say about delair? given the circumstances that he places himself in here. what's going on with the delair? you want to comment on that tiffany? >> in the beginning he's hoping obviously it's going to be really good for his career. it's the first time he's going to be on the ground some place. up to this point his men have been involved in peace keeping but he himself hasn't actually been to the different peace keeping missions his men have been to. so for him this is a step forward. he's seeing it as forwarding his career at the beginning. then going into it, like, after he's actually involved and -- with this, there's a point where he's, like, he decides, he realizes when he's going through the refugee camps, i have to do this for the rwandan people. not just for myself. that's why he names it unimer. it's the mission for rwanda zpl the acronym if you recall, just
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to make sure we're on the same page, the acronym was una, the united nations aid mission for rwanda. but unamfr doesn't really work as an acronym. he takes the mi in mission and takes out the f. he's really committed to that word "for." delair is a complex individual. i think having this very full and very long account is helpful in kind of -- he charts very well the complexities of this thing on the ground. and his own personal motivations into into this. i think that's very helpful in envisioning this thing from a wholistic perspective. alyssa, you had a comment. >> it kind of goes back to what we were talking about. it wasn't worth getting involved. what struck me in the chapper
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"too much too late" he says he got a phone call from an american staffer. he doesn't even know what they are, what they do. >> what page was this? >> 499. and he goes, he told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 ray wandens to justify the risking of the life of one american soldier. then it just raises, like, a whole new set of questions that, like, do we have to define what a human life is worth in order to decide whether or not we're going to get involved in another country? that's what it is. it puts us on a pedestal higher. that's not the idea behind human rights and that's what the united nations is for. >> this is a very important point. what else is goipg on there? what really is going on there that this american bureaucrat calls up delair, with really no clue of what he has faced on the ground, his own experience, and says we're just running some numbers here. and, you know, we need kind of your opinion or your assessment of things, right?
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delair is really confused by this. he says, why? well, we're just running some calculations here that -- a risk assessment that if we lose -- for every soldier we lose, it needs to mean that, you know -- that's the equivalent of losing 85,000 rwandans. what does that indicate about attitudes? about bureaucracy? about this whole process that we're studying tonight? elizabeth. you had a pretty passionate response to that. >> sorry. i just -- i mean, it goes back to -- what struck me the most is the colonialistic attitude and superior attitude that the west has to africa. because it is a developing nation and we didn't see any economic gain from being in rwanda. i mean, even the people we didn't consider to be economically worthwhile to invest in.
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i just think that it so plays up on the western ethnocentrism that has permeated for centuries. it reinforces out of the blue we get this phone call. here's what we decided. >> this is our spreadsheet. we've got graphs. >> excel. we've got it up and run. let's do this. >> it needs to go well on a powerpoint. this is before powerpoint. >> like windows 94. >> eddie? >> i mean, it shows that bureaucracy loses the value of life. through logistics. they're just looking at numbers now. we talked about before genocide. they really look at the numbers of death. instead of what's actually occurring on the ground. there's a diskekconnect. they're just looking at numbers. they're not looking at the lives. they don't care. oh, it's one life here. it's all numbers to them. >> from a comfortable office. >> yeah. from a comfortable office in their bubble where they have -- >> staring at a computer screen.
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>> yeah. he gets to go home at the end of the day to his apartment and live lavishly or comfortably, however he lives, in safety. while delair is on the ground, like, confused. what's going on? he's barely able to survive himself. like i said before, he has barely any supplies for any of his men. >> david? >> yeah. the character of delair, i mean, how i regard him is he is unbelievably unfortunate. unbelievably unfortunate. because he's not -- he's not ethnocentric or yur cent rick. he tells the story of when the moment clicked he was going to do everything he could to protect rwandans. at the same time, he got involved for his career at first. then he noticed there's really a human element here he really cared about. but at that point, i mean, it's -- i mean, he was determined, he was idealistic. but at the same time, he didn't have the resources or, in my opinion, he wasn't the leader to
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lead this effort. he didn't have an extensive knowledge about the issues that were going on in rwanda. so everything that was coming to him, he couldn't anticipate any problems. the problems that came to him, he was reacting to them. like any military man would. >> i think given what you said, david, it's worth reading power's assessment of delair here. i mean, you know, in her chapter, this is page 385 of power. realize power and delair ended up having a -- you know, a kind of professional relationship. and i think involving friendship after this. power -- >> she writes the introduction. >> she writes the introduction to his book. she invited him to be a fellow at the kennedy center for -- kennedy school of government at harvard when she was there before she became part of the obama administration. you know, i mean, i think that she has a deep respect for him. maybe the reading materials we've been given here don't shed light on, perhaps, you know, the other interpretations of delair. you know, what she says is the
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genocide in rwanda cost romeo delair a great deal. it is both paradoxical and natural -- we could parse those words out and think about them. i advise you to do that. pair dox cal and natural that the man who probably did the most to save rwandans feels the worst. by august 1994, delair had a death wish. and then she quotes him. at the end of my command, i drove around in my vehicle with no escort practically looking for ambushes. i was trying to get myself destroyed and looking to get released from the guilt. and so much of the burden that the international community blithely fails to take upon itself, either because of ignorance or lack of will, is placed on the shoulders of this one man who is psychologically, emotionally destroyed at the end of this.
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and that's -- that, you know, it's a destruction of another human life out of this. right? in a way, delair becomes kind of the symbol for the destruction of all the life around him. his own life is shattered by this. and i wonder if, perhaps, we as the international community should share in that. if we should weep along with him and, you know, think about this. this has been keeping me up nights personally. okay? you know, and hopefully that's in an effort to atone for, you know, the sins of, i guess, of all of humanity. the failure of humanity is the subtitle of this. andrew? >> i was just going to say that i think delair is very good at taking in everything that's happening on the ground. just like you said. he had all of these plans. the weapons raid, all of these things. it was really what he calls the triumverant over at the u.n. that kind of didn't allow him to
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lead. i really kind of disagree. he wasn't the leader to take over this. it was just he wasn't allowed to lead by the u.n. i think he was a fine leader. >> that's a good point. alexa, you had a comment. >> i was just going to say in regards to the one life for 85,000, i think that really just exemplifies the overall attitude towards africa. i think there's an overwhelming attitude that they're just africans. doesn't matter. white people are more important. i think i could really see that throughout the whole book. even the media's response to this. i mean, there's just an overall attitude of it doesn't matter. it's over there. we can push it as far as we need to. >> and it's -- i mean, because africans perhaps don't look like us. and they'ir -- you know, their behaviors are bizarre in the eyes of westerners, perhaps some of them. there's still this out moded notion of tribalism and this kind of primitive picture of africa. i lived in africa with americans
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who, you know, expressed to me that they expected to go to africa and see, like, elephants running through villages, you know, that they'd have to protect themselves from wild animals all the time. right? that this was truly their expectation. that outside of the major cities like johannesburg or something like that, that this would be just -- this is wild africa. right? i mean, that's a fundamental disconnect from the realities of humanity in africa. and i think this is an important point that, you know, we've reached halfway through the class here. we've reached the hour mark. maybe we should ponder this as we take a short break and come back and talk some more about it. i know we've got more comments. we can get to those after the break. so at this point, maybe we could -- we talked a little bit during the break about other things that -- other issues here. maybe we could bring some of
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those out in the second part of class here. what other -- what other issues stood out to you as you read these books? tiffany? >> well, like i said, racism. delair, like, himself is very casually racist. just the way he refers to the west as the white west. when honestly that quite -- pretty much isn't true anymore. if it ever was true. and so the fact that people think of themselves as juxtaposed to rwanda, we're the white west versus basically black africa, is inherently racist and probably had a severe effect on the way they reacted to this happening. >> okay. so, i mean, yeah. this is a very good point. how does racism as a phenomenon enter into this? right? of course, we have ethnic tensions. it's not racial tension, but it's ethnic tension. the ethnic identifications.
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but racism as a phenomenon certainly plays a role in all of this. eddie. >> when the, like, belgian soldiers arrive they were starting to say, like, racist comments towards the people there. then delair had -- he mentioned, like, right away he, like, addressed everybody. had a meeting. stating, like, there's no -- he didn't have any tolerance for racism amongst everybody. everybody had to stop their ethnocentrism, basically. they had to look at people as people instead of looking at it through racial lenses. >> for sure. alex? >> how the international community comes up with this idea that for them to solve their problem, like, africans to solve their own problems instead of having, like -- i feel like that's inherently just kind of racist. they can solve their problems better. >> that one's tricky. it's a good point. but that one's tricky given that, i mean, this is a debate within africa itself and has been for some time. really going all the way back to independence. but particularly over the last 20 or 30 years.
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you know, there is a will inside of africa, certainly, for the international community to get out. right? we don't need aid. aid actually does more harm than good. say some people on the ground in africa. even some political figures. it just gets exploited. but at the same time, i mean, this is -- this is also a kind of attitude of the west. there's this dialectic, there's this interaction between, you know, this rhetoric coming out of africa and the rhetoric that ultimately makes it into the kind of international parlance here. you want to comment on that? >> i was going to talk about the whole concept of racism post-cloel yannism. it does play on both size. while the belgians and the other white u.n. peace keepers came in and had this somewhat attitude of racism, it was also displayed on the hutu side as well when it came to the actual, you know, coming into contact with the peace keepers. 18 of them died because the
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hutus in essence were racist and had prejudice against the white people coming back into their continent. >> sure. this goes both ways. jared, you had a comment. >> whenever we were discussing kosovo and they're like us, and rwanda, they're not. we have the same religion as them. predominantly in the west we're christian. they're all christian in rwanda. but they're not like us p p they don't look like us. so countries like france and the uk and the united states that could have done something didn't. >> yeah. there's this comment in delair where he says that even after a lot of the information about what's happening on the ground in rwanda starts to leak to the west, there are images, news footage and things like this, is making it to the west. of course, it doesn't compete with nancy kerrigan and tonya harding and o.j. simpson and everything. right? but people start to notice this. okay?
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and the u.n. gives him a directive to try to cut costs. right? you're spending too much money. which he -- what they were spending in the former yugoslavia? he says millions of dollars a day. a day. and he had a $50 million budget for the entire year in a situation that was just as complex in its own way as what was going on in bosnia. okay? and so i think you raise a good point here. is racism an element of this? you know, the evidence certainly weighs on that side. david? >> certainly it's an element between the tutsi and the hutu. and i think that the u.n. -- the mission's initial misunderstanding or at least their inability to kind of
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comprehend how deep that divide really went kind of froze them to where they couldn't anticipate the genocide that would occur. i mean, because ultimately the big -- for me, we ask the question could this have been prevented, the big question for me was it could have been prevented if it had been in their minds that this was a possibility of happening. because then they would not have gone in with such a lack of resources and lack of personnel. because if they'd known this was a possibility, either they wouldn't have gone in at all or they would have gone in with the proper personnel to be able to mitigate this. >> yeah. it's striking how often that delair but also others, right, are stunned by the depolarization and the incredible, you know, vitriol sort of hate propaganda and how that catches them so off guard from a policymaking perspective. because so frequently it seems their perception is that we're dealing with a fairly traditional state. and then a fairly traditional rebellious army. right? and it's effectively a question
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of negotiating for distribution of offices. right? so which people from the hutu side and which tutsis will be in which offices once the new government after they reach the accords are enforced and put in place. and they seem not to kind of understand that. i was struck by this point that samantha power makes on a number of occasions which is that there's a failure of imagination. kind of an incapacity to truly perceive and to appreciate in some genuine and deep way the capacity for evil. not just within individual, you know, human beings, but within specific particular contexts. yeah, david, i think that's a great point. >> and this touches on a theme that we've explored throughout this course, right? which is the fact that genocide really is unbelievable. okay? i mean, everything from at the beginning of the semester talking about lemkin, rafael lemkin confronting -- is it brandice or something like that?
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fra frankfurter. he gives him depails about what's going on in europe with the nazis and the jews. and he says i don't believe you. i don't believe you. something like that. or i can't believe this. i don't say -- i'm not saying you're lying, i just can't believe this. i cannot wrap my head around this. and as a result of that, i really can't act. right? then this is -- this is not just a failure of imagination as dr. vanden houten puts it on the part of the international community. even on the ground. in 1944 being deported from hungary, the nazis come in. they're dumbfounded these european jews in 1944 don't know what's going on with their people elsewhere in europe. how can you not know what happens to jews in 1944? right? there's this quote from the book
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"machete season" which we've read, of course. this is a tutsi victim or survivor of this. talking about the hate broadcasts on radio mikolin. the rtm propaganda channel, right? she says, what they said was so cleverly put and repeated so often, meaning the hate broadcasts, the propaganda, that we tutsis as well, we found them funny to listen to. i mean, that's a tragic irony, right? they were clambering for the massacre of all the cockroaches. of course, the word the hutus use for the tutsis. for us, the tutsis, those witty words were hilarious. the songs urging all the hutus to get together to wipe out the tutsis, we laughed out loud at the jokes. same thing for the hutu ten commandments which vowed to do
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us in. we got so used to these things, that we didn't listen to the horrible threats anymore. so the failure of imagination extended to the people who would become the victims of this. right? i mean, it's unbelievable. genocide as a phenomenon is unbelievable. the amount of bodies. the staggering numbers. the staggering amount of brutality that goes into this in all of the cases we have looked at, it's unbelievable. that people could do this to people is unbelievable. and that leads to the failure of imagination. comments. elizabeth? >> another -- samantha power's forward to the delair book, when she references the beetle -- >> which is exactly -- >> right. but then she follows it up
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saying, delair was ridiculed for his presence and mistrusted for his emotion. he was told repeatedly as he pleaded for troops that he was looking at the situation in a simplistic fashion. which i think highlights what you were saying. like -- >> they're not going to kill. >> yeah. >> that's too simple. >> yeah. well, and they -- they've got all this talk. but we're there now. so it's not that big of a deal. and you're thinking that it's going to be way worse than it actually is. and after he has repeatedly said, this is, like, you have no idea what's happening here, and andrew and i were talking about it during the break. it's out of touch, yes. but also willful ignorance. like, you just are turning a blind -- not you, but the u.s. government and the u.n. are turning blind eyes because they just, like you're saying, they can't believe it. because it's modern. and i know i keep returning to that. and the thing that gets me is, you know, we think of
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genocide -- some think of genocide as a modern phenomena. but here it's not. this is a very hands on, rudimentary genocide where people are being killed with clubs and machetes and things like that. and so i thought that that was really ironic that they're telling him that he's looking at it in too simplistic of fashion when this is happening in a simplistic way. >> yes. >> and so he's looking at it exactly the way that it needed to be seen. it's the people that he was reporting to that were not looking at it in the fashion that it needed to be. >> on that point, the international response is by turns -- insists by turns that either, you know, your view of this is too simplistic or it's too complex. and on both counts, they're wrong. right? that it's not. i mean, you're right about it being very primitive. and brutal. the fact that these people killed mostly with machetes or
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clubs or rudimentary implements, right? screwdrivers in some cases. i can't even fathom what that must have been like. but at the same time, and this is where the international community just fails to appreciate the imagination, as it were, of the hutus who were planning and leading this. at the same time, they have this really sophisticated understanding of international politics. they calculate and know that if they do something similar to mogadishu, that the will of the international community is going to -- to chicken out. right? that it's not going to be sufficient. they're not going to have sufficient backbone to stick it out. and so, i mean, what strikes me is both the simplicity and the complexity of this and the fact yur of the international community to appreciate both of those things. edd eddie? >> to go along with that, too, he knew by january 10th, like, that's when he got jean pierre,
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the code name for the member who gave him the information -- >> just so we all recall this. this is an informer he has. high placed among the leadership of the hutus. and who knows what's going on with the militias who are organized to kill. right? he gets really good information from him. so go ahead. >> he gets good information. like there's a quote right here on 142. he says he and others like him were ordered to have cells under their command, make lists of the tootsies in their various communes. jean pierre suspect zed these lists were being made so the tutsis -- the word means cockroaches -- could easily be rounded up and exterminated. so this was common knowledge. also going along with that he finds out there's weapon caches. four of them. that r going to are going to bed
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locally within the next couple weeks. this is four months before the genocide. so he already has his wealth of knowledge. already knows what's going on. he sends the cable to new york city. he sends all this information. vets the information as well. gets one of his men is shown one of the weapons caches which is right underneath one of the buildings, which is ironic, that he just went to earlier that day. this is all happening. sends the information. vets it. he's expecting -- he makes like he's going to go raid these weapons caches not even asking for permission because it's part of his mandate anyways. he made it in there. that's why he calls it chapter 6 1/2. it's not really chapter 6. the clause about trying to protect against crimes against humanity. he does that and they deny it. this is months in advance. this is vetted information that he has. it's on the ground. they don't trust him for it. >> not only do they deny the action, they tell him essentially to go rat out his informer. >> they tell him to go to the president.
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to tell what's going on -- >> go and tell him that he has an informer among his ranks who's giving a clue about the planning of the genocide. i mean, that -- that just -- i have a hard time understanding the motivations there. okay. >> yeah. >> you want to follow? >> on top of it, he was in a weird position because his -- both the unamir and all the other acronyms were infiltrated by rgf. so they had already infiltrated. so whatever -- he couldn't really say anything. he was locked. then they forced him to betray to the people, which he knew the hutu power for the people that were suhr rounlded by the president when he told them this information were part of their hutu power movement were the extremists. >> there are times when delair gets confronted by these hutu politicians who seem to know about the actions taken by his office almost before he does. discussions taking place among bureaucrats. he says, i knew my office was as
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leaky as a sieve. but it was frightening to see that kind of placed right before me. to see the evidence of that. okay? these are all just part of the challenges. >> then he's further compromised by the fact that at that time rwanda has a seat on the security council. so the representative of the interim government, the hutu extremist, is in the most, you know, delicate of conversations among the security council members about what's happening. he's presumably there at the april 15th closed door meeting where they're floating policy options and the united states says unequivocally, you know, there'll be no american support for an expansion of the mission because of the fear the mission is just inherently vulnerable and can't be retrieved. so he's getting all that information. so it goes back to alex's point before that delair is often sitting just in this isolated way, right? with no real -- he certainly doesn't have a mastery of the information on the ground. right? >> the terrible, brutal, tragic ironies of the whole situation
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are just almost breathtaking in their scope. tiffany? >> i think also what's shocking is that they approved his mandate. they knew -- chapter 6 1/2, they knew he put that clause in about crimes against humanities. so that was -- he was obligated by that mandate to do it. but because they ordered him not to, he was torn between do i go with the mandate that i said that i would do, i vowed i would take these actions to prevent crimes against humanity which i know are going to happen, or do i follow the orders of my superiors? and just the fact that -- i mean, i think he is partially responsible for the fact that he goes and goes along with his superiors instead of staying to his mandate. even though he doesn't have the resources really to support his mandate. the fact that he just backs off. >> yeah. david, you want to follow that up? >> i had a comment. but it was lost in the -- >> maybe we can focus it. a lot of this conversation is
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turned on the question of prevention at this point. right? what could have been done to prevent this. and the juxtaposition of what could have been done, you know, kind of in the hindsight that we have now saying, if only delair had been given 5,000 troops. if only he had been given vehicles that actually worked. if only he had been given, you know, enough ammunition, or if the belgians and the u.n. had been able to sort out who was going to pay for the ammunition so they had sufficient for their needs, right? that juxtaposed with the -- the inability of them on the ground to, you know, to carry out even the most basic of mandates is really -- maybe we should turn our conversation in that direction here. david, go ahead. >> what delair says himself in his conclusion on page 516, and
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this -- and this comment, i think, was also referring to a general global trend. but i think it can also be applied to this specific mission. where he says as a global community it is crucial that we develop an international pool of multidisciplinary, multiskilled and humanist senior leaders to fill these force commander billets. so for this to have been a success, i mean, he needed every resource available. he needed all the contacts available. i mean, i think -- i think someone as knowledgeable as even yourself, dr. young, on african affairs could have been useful to him more than just the people that he was given who didn't seem to kaer for the job. and the point that he makes about humanist, i mean, that's the most important thing. because he talks about, yeah, there were these logistical failures. there were these failures among the soldiers. failures with the bureaucrats. but ult ma tly the failure was the ability of not enough human beings being able to care about the dying rwandans. >> yeah. >> enough to where they were willing to make risk. >> in particular, at the senior level.
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>> yeah. >> i'm going to go back to the point you opened with. you know, the key failure here is at the highest level of leadership. >> i think that kind of goes into the legacy that we have in terms of the rwandan genocide. on 513, i think it's really important that delair points out toward the middle of the page on the second paragraph, to properly mourn the dead and respect the potential of the living, we need accountability and not blame. and that just spoke such volumes to me. because it's really saying, you know, it's nice to talk about prevention. it's nice to talk about not letting these things happen again. but if no one in the international community is stepping up and saying, you know, i was part of the reason that these people died. i was part of the reason that this genocide was perpetrated, nothing is going to get done. because at this point, and he points out prior to that, everyone's -- everyone is pointing fingers at one another. and it really -- it's not amounting to anything. and it's unfortunate.
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>> something that struck me as i was reading -- it was mostly in the last two chapters. was how he kept referencing how the united -- like if he had add support of the united states he could have done so much. i guess the problem i had with it was that i don't know why he thought the united states was, like, what was going to solve the problem. because we clearly had no interest. we failed multiple times in other attempts of going into a country. and he says on 497, this was when it was coming to an end and people were starting to get -- more countries were starting to get involved. unamir 2 was in the works. i could not believe the outside world was finally coming into the ray wanden catastrophe and screwing it up so totally. for the same reasons that prevented them from reacting properly to the genocide in the first place. i flew back that night knowing that without the support of the americans for the homeward bound plan -- other countries are
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coming in. they haven't been there. they don't know what's going on. they don't know what needs to be done. he does but he has no control over it really. and i just kept coming back to how he thinks the united states was going to solve it. and it's -- everything was leading to the exact opposite. even if we cared enough to get involved, like, we don't know what they need. we don't care. >> it seems that he wants to just kind of keep coming back to this point. as you rightly pointed out, on 514, he then comes back and again, right at the very bottom, he says, i truly believe the missing piece in the puzzle was the political will from france and the united states to meet the accords and ultimately move this imploding nation towards democracy and lasting peace. there's no doubt these two countries possess the solution to the rwandan crisis. it seems there that i think a key piece of that is his argument that the recognition early on that the united states was just simply not going to deliver, or not going to commit
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in any appreciable way, right, becomes the significant piece of the story. >> what -- what does delair -- that does beg the question, what does delair think that the united states would have been key to this? andrew, you want to speak to that? >> i mean, they -- i mean, we were the -- like, the super power kind of at the time. the u.n. headquarters is there. even powers kind of suggests that we could have kind of led the way if we had just given a few of -- like, apcs or a few troops. and that would have at least showed that this superpower is willing and kind of got more of the western powers involved. so i think it was just that recognition for the rest of the world to say, okay, if they're going, we're going, kind of deal. >> right. i mean, you know, look at what had happened just three or four years before this with the persian gulf war. you know, the united states came to the aid of kuwait. to juxtapose rwanda and kuwait
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is more -- perhaps even, you know, more shocking and helpful for our purposes than juxtaposing rwanda and -- and yugoslavia. okay? because in that case, you know, there could have been, and saddam hussein had shown and continued to show throughout the '90s that he was capable of committing genocide on a breathtaking scale with the kurds with chemical weapons. you know, with things like this. there's another chapter in power that we haven't looked at that covers this. right? but in the case of kuwait, there was a political will. of course, there were resources. that people wanted to protect, right? take away anything, but, you know, give us cheap gasoline. right? kill all the people you want, but if you hurt our -- the price of our oil, then we're really going to get involved. but when the united states got involved in that, i remember
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watching -- again, i was watching this in high school unfold. norman schwarzkopf would stand up there in his pentagon briefings and talk about, you know, kind of list, all right, the french are here. the saudis are here. you know, the syrians are here. i mean, they involved all of these middle eastern countries, these european countries. there was this broad coalition, right, of people involved in this. and it was legitimized. and this is where president bush is saying, this is a new world order led by the united states. and i think delair is coming at it from that perspective to some extent and saying, this could have been done in rwanda. and none of this would have happened. and a million people would still be alive and enjoying their families and probably on the road to democracy as a political system here. >> and i think the failure to act comes back to alyssa's point, too. it's so often it's sort of stumbling and bumbling and ignorance of circumstances on
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the ground. it's sort of extraordinary that -- i think it's samantha power who quotes anthony lake, who was a national security adviser at the time, says i don't -- there was never a high level discussion at all in the white house about the rwanda crisis. boe tris boe tris galley in his memoirs tells the story about when he met with clinton in may of 1994. clinton passed over rwanda almost without comment and was more concerned about advocating the case of the united states supported canada to chair unicef. and it just never emerged as a policy priority until this sense of urgency emerged in late june of there needs to be a reaction. there needs to be something that we do. then again, the action that's undertaken is essentially indifferent to the circumstances on the ground. i mean, there is clearly emerging in the displaced camps, right, the refugee camps a human rights catastrophe.
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i think delair's point is what would have been the much more viable, prudent, long-term solution would have been moving those people back into -- into rwanda as quickly as possible. >> i mean, i think that he wanted the united states to lead as well was because of the capability. like he mentions, especially when it comes to the radio station. like, they're calling out the names of these moderates. and then he's looking at countries that have the capabilities of doing -- there are three capabilities. it comes down to the united states. and they have the technology to jam this radio station or just destroy it, bomb it. like, they showed, especially in the gulf war, that they can have precision attacks. they don't have to destroy -- >> smart bombs. tomahawk cruise missiles. >> yes. surgical precision. so they can do this technology. it costs, like, $8,000 something an hour. >> $8,500 an hour. and that's too costly. >> and that's too costly. >> we've got to worry about that plane being up in the air. they could shoot this down. you know, but $8,500 an hour.
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we just cannot stomach that cost here. >> yeah. as a result, like, all those people died. like, they were called out these names. even he was called out. all his men started being called out. they wouldn't even jam it. they wouldn't do it because it was too costly. like he said, they're spending millions of dollars. >> this is also one of those cases where tragically, you n e know, the kind of misplaced values are trotted out there. well, freedom of speech, right? these people have freedom of speech. i guess the question is, does freedom of speech extend to identifying the locations of individuals so you can kill them? is that how far freedom of speech should go? and i defy you to, you know, find a moral ground where you could justify that. but that was used as an effort, you know, to -- as an excuse not to do something really fairly simple and cost effective to prevent the loss of human life.
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>> and i think in policy terms, you hit on the right words there. it becomes a kind of excuse. because just simply within -- i mean, just within legal doctrine under the first amendment, if we're thinking in terms of trying to extend the embrace of that, it seems clearly you could make the case of what's going on in that context, the speech constitutes what would be permitted to be restricted under the context of a clear and present danger. right? you could demonstrate that's exactly what we're talking about so that this would be a set of circumstances where, you know, you're perfectly within your rights to intervene and prevent that. it's also staggering how badly state reads the genocide convention in late april, early -- in may where they're arguing over, you know, look, we can't reach the standard of intent. i mean with, that becomes a cra claim. also their policy recommendation is that the convention requires us to then act and intervene. effectively militarily, right?
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one of the things that's so striking is how everyone quickly comes to the conclusion that doing anything requires, you know, u.s. intervention with a large military force. i mean, the genocide convention doesn't necessarily -- it doesn't obligate you, right, legally under the convention to take military action. but i also think it's important to bear in mind, again, we go back to this failure of imagination, how frequently imabove risched the policy discussions are about what can be done. and as well the analysis of what's ultimately happening on the ground. and even delair portrays this a little bit where there's this period where he's clearly thinking in terms of, okay. what are the negotiations among the main players? and how is it that we, you know, preserve the arusha accords when it seems that what's emerging in front of him is an inferno of slaughter and murder.
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>> why the united states is looked upon for this and certainly our nearly trillion dollar military expenditure budget has a lot to do with that. also it comes down to if you look at the rhetoric that comes from the american political leaders, it's almost as if we're inviting the world to look at us this way. i mean, the very founding principles of the nation say -- are not just life and liberty for americans. but that people have a right to this. so the very political rhetoric of the -- of the american spectrum is that we are supposed to be these world leaders, these moral and conscience world leaders. certainly the policies and practices of the country haven't always translated to that, but we still talk that way. so it really comes down to the fact that the rest of the world is just looking at us saying, well, do you really mean this? because if you mean this, then this is an opportunity for you to demonstrate. >> i think it's -- i think it's personyay and his book on africa's world war has this point. it touches directly on what you're say, david. there's this moment where a switch is thrown where there's
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then this deep sense of american guilt at a feeling of hypocrisy. a failure to do anything. i think it's pernier makes the point that in the post-genocide rhetoric americans appear to be the ones most often at pains to express their sense of guilt. as though we sort of failed ultimately to live up to the principles and to play the role -- >> bill clinton was uniquely placed as a president to do this. given that he had to apologize a number of times for his own behavior. >> well practiced. >> power points out that here we have a polished president that's used to making apologies. and, you know, he was, i guess, the right man for the job. again, ironically, right? tiffany? >> i did -- i wanted to bring up the involvement -- because we haven't really discussed it yet. the religious aspects of this. specific because rwanda is pretty much everything we've
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read acknowledges a roman catholic country. >> both hutus and tutsis. they have a shared language. this is one of the things that mystified people about them and led people to believe there could be a solution that was fairly painless. these people actually share a lot. >> the context for this observation is that shortly before this is happening in rwanda, you see in latin america in america essentially a genocide there. the response of the local catholic church is to try to protect the people as opposed to the government which is slaughtering el salvadorians by the thousands at the times. i guess my question was, what was the roman catholic response to what's going on in rwanda because we're seeing people being murdered by priests in churches in rwanda. >> at least the priests were turning into tutsi parishioners. >> allowing this to happen. people were being murdered inside churches by the rgf and
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by the hutu power. >> the holy family church. >> what is the roman catholic churches in the vatican, what's their response to this? do they declare these people murderers? do they do anything at all as far as their response to -- and aid for what's going on in this? are there any repercussions for the priests that get involved in this? >> i mean, this has been one of the, of course, themes of the tribunals held. both locally, internally and, you know, internationally. there has been a focus on these priests and nuns. other church figures who were involved in this. but, yeah, several responses. andrew? >> delair talks about he gets, like, a special communication from the u.n. where it's like the pope has asked you to specifically find this -- i think it was a group of nuns. like, polish nuns. to go do that. that's the only thing that i read about the -- the
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catholic -- >> i guess another staggering element of this, unamir is tasked with this overwhelming responsibility in the early stages of the genocide to get out all ex-patriots. right? so they go into the furthest reaches of the country into the schools, catholic schools, monasteries in some cases, and pull these people out. you've seen the movie hotel rwanda, there is a heart breaking scene where all of the people show up at the goor stdo where they were hiding people and you have these priests and all these figures being told you need to give these kids up and leave. and you see these nuns
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separating from their european counter part and all the europeans get on the buses, head to the airport and leave. and that is lk unbelievable again that given the kind of vocation of someone in that position, that this could happen. i don't know if it's the pressure of the moment, the misunderstanding of what is really going on here, the political pressures brought to bear, the fwaact that soldiers with guns are telling them get on the bus, leave these people. but i've never been able to quite understand that whole sequence of efforts. >> the effort to get out patriots in general out of all of the country, multiple countries did that. france, belgium.
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they had -- even the u.s. had 300 marines on the ground. and while they're doing this, he's like i have enough men right now. if you just all combine forces right now to stop this, we have 5,000 troop as combined. the belgium soldiers grounded and other places weren't allowed to land. but he had enough forces. it was the communication like in general wasn't there. they just couldn't get all the forces together. and most people didn't speak the same language. a lot of the troops were made up from multiple countries. >> you got bangladesh who didn't speak french or english, can't commute indicate with anybody. it's almost comical. he says i communicated with these people in french, these people in glifrn english, and t
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to in turn communicate with these people in a different language. so the failure of communication on multiple levels, he cuts to the chase begin that he's bilingual, he has to translate. here he is this translate who is overseeing military operations on the ground, but he gets involved this kind of the most basic clerical functions here which is part of the problem. >> you were saying about the lack of communication. even beyond the fact that they couldn't really sit and have a good conversation, they didn't have any method of communicating over distances any ways. he talks about how he got a shipment of jeeps, trucks, military truck, and they were left on the tarmac overnight and they came and took anything they could from the cheaps on top of the radios. so they didn't even have anyway to communicate between themselves and brings it up multiple times the radio station was just playing and they had no
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way of disseminating their side of the story to the population. he was like, wow, i wish i could get the majority that don't want to happen, but kra. it's like i have a bull horn and everyone else is sitting there on their phones and they can talk just right next to each other. >> the fact that a u.n. force cannot communicate nearly as well. they're just listening to the radio and given instructions in this house on this street, you will find them, go and kill them. >> his radios don't have any encryption capacity, so they're being broadcast in the clear. you have that moment when you have belgium, french, italian troops on the ground, 300 american troops in about a rundy. you have a force, but you come
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back to the whole relationship that great powers take typically with the u.n., which is that they will not subordinate their soldiers under the command of an officer from another nation. so a sense that troops are sitting there with either the capacity to create safe areas proposed or at least just demonstrate force on the ground. one thing that happens in this period is that the leaders of the radical government once the president has been killed are quite deliberately testing international reaction. they're trying to see just how much latitude they will ultimately be given by the
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international community and what they can get away with and they just begin to recognize that no one will be able to stomach a larger commitment and people will let these events unfold. and that the only real threat to us is the rpf. >> they do this in africa once in a while. 3,000 people die, just -- >> right. exactly. >> brief comments here and we have just a few minutes left. we probably need to wrap up with some ideas here. >> off that point, not only did the expatriate extractions kind of signal to the leaders that nothing was going to happen, but they like used these points, right, as kind of when expatriates get pulled out and all of the rwandas are there under the assumption the u.n. is there to help them, as well, they come in and round up all of the rwanda that had been waiting there. and i think that touches on both
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like the simplistic way that elizabeth was talking about earlier, but also highly sophisticated in that they're using u.n. response as a means to like gather people in one area. and we saw that in a film, too, on tuesday. >> i didn't really have a comment. i was just sitting here wondering, because after rwanda, what happened with the political will to intervene? i mean we had instances in libya and we had the excuse for the war in iraq was to save people from saddam hussein. so of wondering with all the different problems that we discussed, and they're certainly capable of happening again in the future, so if our interest seems to be-when i say our, it seems like the senior leadership interest seems to be in symbolism and promoting
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principle only for the purpose of appearing to not be totally indifferent to it, that's meaningless. and if it's meaningless, it won't last as a viable political option. so is the future that we don't get involved? because the only other alternative to make sure that these types of failures don't happen again, by having the resources, by doubling the budget, bhi haviy having the pe needed. because the current path is just going to result in more failure if we're not interested in having these concrete very broad strategies that take into account political historical and pens and papers. >> i know partly the political response operating on two levels. one, there clearly was greater rhetoric. although you can make a case that intervention came late in the game. and darfur, as well. 2005, the united nations world
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summit effectively ratifies this notion that there a responsibility to protect the international community, a responsibility to protect people and we're not just simply going to give blanket protection to the old practice decisitraditio sovereignty. and this is invoked in the case of libya. on the other level, i think the more political response among people in firms of thinking what effective intervention could look like, the family sis has turned toward looking for predictors, the claim being we can identify the circumstances on the ground right for again side and therefore you need to see those coming and then intervene in ways perhaps not necessarily in the form of a military force, but maybe just greater support for the piece process that is unfolding and
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greater sensitivity to the circumstances on the grounds. but i think the idea has become for humanitarian and political reasons that preventive action has to in fact be the place where the emphasis goes. because once all hell breaks loose, i think there is a few that most democracies right now, their attitude will be we're not going to get involved unless there is some clear identifiable national interest that makes it essential to entintervene. and in iraq and afghanistan, certainly sobered the american public opinion. >> they have zapped the will. i think there was greater will a decade ago for this. that may be the height of the streak that happened of a der rwanda. but my great f
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in el salvador there's

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